It happens that I have recently co-written (with the Guardian’s Kevin Maguire) a book called Great Parliamentary Scandals, which offers a pretty good compendium of the more famous or indicative cases since the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon’s embarrassments in 1621 over bribery and young men. There are scores, and the present public fuss over the Home Secretary finds some striking echoes in recent and less recent history.

Here follows, then a quick canter, in brutal summary, through those parliamentary stories over the past 125 years which might be thought to have some bearing on the present fuss. I offer no opinion about any of them, but hope the facts may be useful.

At the end of the 19th century, the unmarried Charles Stuart Parnell (and with him Gladstone’s plan for Irish Home Rule) was brought down by his association with the wife of Captain William O’Shea. At first secretly (her husband later claimed) and then openly the couple began an affair. In time they moved in together, Mrs O’Shea having left her husband. The Pall Mall Gazette spilt the beans. Cecil Rhodes cabled Parnell from South Africa: “Resign. Marry. Return.” But Parnell clung on, and lost his party. There was discussion of the paternity of Kitty’s children, who were almost certainly Parnell’s.

In 1886 the prominent Liberal Charles Dilke, unmarried at the time, and a contender for his party’s leadership, was brought down by his associations with a number of women (“he taught me every French vice,” one housemaid testified) but principally with a Mrs Virginia Crawford. Her husband had private detectives report on her infidelities. The MP was cited (among a number of men) in the Crawfords’ divorce proceedings, and the Pall Mall Gazette spilt the beans. Mrs Crawford was pictured, tight-bodiced, holding a riding whip. Dilke kept his seat but his famously upright Prime Minister, William Gladstone, never again dared give him office.

Gladstone survived persistent rumour (which was true) about his sessions at Downing Street with street prostitutes, whom he invited in for Bible readings, afterwards scourging himself for his impure thoughts and recording the scourgings in his diary with the sign of a whip. The press never dared publish the story.

In 1922 the First Commissioner of Works, Lewis (“Lou-Lou”) Harcourt (responsible for the present aspect of many of our London parks) committed suicide in his home in Brook Street in London’s West End (now the Savile Club). Rumours (true) about the (married) minister’s paedophile activities and child pornography had reached the police. The coroner declared that his death had been by misadventure. Contemporaneous political society knew the truth. Nothing reached the papers.

Nobody much doubts that David Lloyd George conducted an affair with (among many other women) the wife of a Montgomeryshire doctor, Mrs Catherine Edwards, but, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1909, he sued The People for libel for repeating this. Lloyd George persuaded his wife Margaret, who knew the truth, to perjure herself in court and deny it. Their son Richard reported his father’s conversation beforehand: “You must help me, Maggie. If I get out of this I give my oath you shall never have to suffer this ordeal again”. The People lost, and Lloyd George continued his philandering, and became Prime Minister.

In 1930 a Welsh Labour MP and former miner, Thomas Isaac Mardy Jones, was forced to resign as an MP after his wife and daughter were caught using his parliamentary rail warrants to travel to London.

In 1963 John Profumo (married) was Secretary of State for War before he fell. Christine Keeler, his call-girl friend, was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attaché. It is often said that “lying to the House” was his downfall but this over-simplifies a messy if exotic story (Stephen Ward, who introduced Keeler to Profumo after the latter found her naked in the swimming pool at Lord Astor’s Cliveden estate, committed suicide).

There were both security implications, and the feeling that Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan (himself cuckolded by Robert Boothby), needed to dispel an aura of Tory decadence surrounding a party which had been in power too long.

The story took bizarre and complex twists, spawning sub-plots involving other ministers, and an inquiry conducted by Lord Denning which led the late Bernard Levin, who died this year, to explode (in his Times column in 1963): “How it came about, almost exactly two-thirds of the way through the 20th century, and in a country as advanced as Britain, that a judge should have been obliged to ask a doctor to examine the penis of a politician, is something so extraordinary, and in many ways so significant, that it deserves examination as detailed as that which the Minister underwent.” To this day that minister’s identity has never been revealed.

In 1973 the Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, lost two ministers within three days. Lord Jellicoe stood down after being linked to a police inquiry into a “top people’s vice ring”. The allegations related to call-girls. Lord Lambton, meanwhile, had been caught in flagrante delicto in a News of the World sting involving a hidden cine-camera and a microphone up a teddy-bear’s nose; Lambton ’s tale involved marijuana as well as women in the same “vice-ring” as Jellicoe’s.